I've been framed!

There are two ways to change the meaning of something - you can change the something, or you can change the context in which you say it. If we don't account for this, we will make terrible mistakes in communicating with each other, and even with ourselves. If we grasp this, we can overcome many of the problems that plague our world today, which are results of unrealized context shifts. We have content processors but what we need now are "context-processors."

We all know that a quote, taken "by itself" out of context can be totally different than what it meant at the time. This is often visible in courtroom dramas, where the person is asked by the attorney, "Answer, yes or no, did you say this?" followed by some damning phrase or sentence that sounds totally wrong out of context. We all know this is unfair and somehow wrong, but don't have a strong way to assert that or to understand how pervasive this effect is.

It doesn't just affect communications. It affects our ability to work alone!

My favorite expression of this truth was a cartoon one day by Charles Schultz of Snoopy, the dog, lying on top of his doghouse, staring at the stars and pondering. He said:

Did you ever notice
that if you think about something at 2 AM
and then again at noon the next day
you get two different answers?

This cartoon is profound. Slow down and consider that this means. This says that a correctly functioning human being has a context-sensitive thinker-thingie that produces different answers to the same inputs depending on what larger context it is sitting in at the time.

This is, in my mind, a "feature not a bug." In fact, this seems to me to be the key to reconciling humans and resolving age old conflicts that have seemed totally impossible to tackle.

This is also a critical insight in trying to figure out how to make decisions today that don't seem totally stupid tomorrow.

That's true whether you are a person, a group, a corporation, or a nation.

We are walking around comparing "content" and failing to account for different "context" in which that content was perceived or generated. In small, local worlds where context is shared and identical among people, we used to be able to get away with that. Once we start trying to cross cultures or "silos" of expertise, and do something interdisciplinary or international, this tends to trip us up every time. We didn't learn the "general case."

Content is explicit, obvious, the kind of thing you can hit with a hammer. Context is implicit, invisible, unstated, and hard to describe even when you try. But it is vital that we learn how to do this, to get by in a diverse world - a world in which different people are operating in different contexts but trying to communicate with each other over space and time.

It is crucial when we try to take some thought or observation, about a patient, say, and "record it" in some electronic database where we will pull it up a year later and compare the two to see what changed. Are we capturing what we need to do that assessment correctly? Are we writing something down in words that will bring up the right thoughts to a different doctor next year?

Tragically, we have failed, socially, to understand the full implications of this issue. The miracle of technology allows us to store or send content across space at the speed of light, but, oopsie, forgot about the context part of the message. What gets delivered is not what was sent, in huge ways.

It does not have to be this way. In the same way that we have built computers that do content-processing correctly, we can build environments that do context-processing correctly. It is critically important that we learn how to do that.

Now, these effects are not flaws in humans that would go away if we were all "rational" or "scientists" or if we all based our judgment on "data" and "evidence." These effects are properties of the very nature of space, time, and information itself. We cannot "get around them" or ignore them. We are going to have to learn how to account for them correctly.

It doesn't have to be hard, but it does have to be done, or we'll keep fighting needless wars, between parties that actually agree with each other but don't realize it.

Take the example of "perspective" -- a distortion of space where it appears to each observer that things "far away from them" are small, and things "close to them" are large, and as you move towards a distant building or mountain it "gets larger."

At some point in life as infants we figure out that the thing we're looking at actually isn't changing size at all, it's an illusion, a distortion, caused by where we are looking from, our viewpoint. If we didn't correct for this, we could argue all day about which of two things was "bigger" and what was "fair" and not get a resolution, because A looks bigger to me than B, but looks smaller to you. Once we correct for that perspective distortion, we can resolve that question in a way that makes us both happy. This happened so early in our lives we forget we had to learn it.

There is a popular misconception that because things are "relative", there is no underlying reality, and no way to ever reconcile them. Einstein said the opposite. He said that actually, once you understand what is going on, you can completely reconcile observations made by two competent observers, relative to their own reference frames, all the time, every time. You can totally account for the changes, say, in perspective between two observers, and figure out entirely how the world I see needs to be warped and twisted to give the world you see.

Computer animators and virtual worlds have to deal with this "perspective" or "viewpoint" transformation all the time. It's a lot of bookkeeping under the covers, but straight-forward if you do it carefully.

Unfortunately, there are other shifts in context that are less familiar to us that impact our ability to reach agreement. The problem is very deep, as I said, built into the nature of space and time itself.

Once, in my astrophysics grad student days, I took a course in Cosmology and General Relativity. I didn't get it all, but I got enough to get the story, which is not that hard to tell, and does not require math. Please don't flee. There will be no quiz. Everyone one here gets an "A".

The essence of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity could be distilled down to three insights, widely misunderstood. You don't need to be Einstein to understand these ideas.

The insights are that

• content and context are completely equivalent in what can be said, though widely different in what can be expressed easily in each;
  
• you cannot change one without affecting the other;
• if you do your sums right, the changes are completely predictable.

In the world described by relativity, the meaning of a very concrete phrase or physical expression or very real measurement of velocity, say, changes as you slide it around in space and time, most famously if you attach the observation to different observers traveling at different speeds. I can only observe your speed "relative to me", so depending on how fast I'm going, I'll measure something different.

This is no big deal. People in a car on the highway appear stationary to each other, even though the car is speeding down the road.

Or, if I'm standing on the Earth, I see the sun, obviously moving across the sky, going around the Earth. If I'm standing in some space ship off to the side, I see the earth spinning and the sun remaining fixed. These observations are both right, relative to the "reference frame" in which they were made. To reconcile them you have to account for the different in frames used by two completely competent observers.

Implications
==========

Well, what does this mean? For one thing, it means that where you work or spend time thinking or talking to each other affects what result you'll come up with. A decision that is "obvious", made in a bunker-like dimly-lit War-Room deep underground might not be at all the same decision that would have been made, given the "same facts", in a cheery, sunny deck in a woodsy retreat on a warm spring day.

It means that an "obvious" decision about what to do next, made standing in an urban war zone with explosions in the distance is not the same decision, given the same information, that is "obvious" viewed by people safely out of harm's way, at their leisure, later, reviewing the tapes over coffee and some nice Danish.

In fact, as a child, I observed that the behaviors that seemed to make the great leaders "great" in war movies wasn't that they were brilliant, but that they simply managed to remain stable and sane when the world around them had gone to hell. They remained connected to a larger, stable world despite the fact that their body was located in a locally unstable one.

Maybe, there is value in having content-intensive work like "science" embedded in larger stabler social frameworks that religions have sometimes produced in the past. I find it fascinating that, according to a recent issue of New Scientist, geneticists are discovering that far from being "junk DNA", the DNA between the 22,000 genes that code for proteins (content) may be even more important, and this "junk" codes for the larger context that decides when and whether that content should be expressed, or modified in the way it is expressed. (Junking the Junk DNA, New Scientist, July 11, 2007).

Yesterday, I did a post on the software world "Second Life" and possible roles of virtual reality in getting people to experience worlds they couldn't get to on their own. Today, I want to add to that the idea that virtual worlds are virtual contexts, which means that you can conceivably adjust not just the contents of a scene, but the context of the scene in which those contents are embedded.

This may be the tool we need to explore more how context and content interact with each other for humans, and to learn how susceptible we all are to "framing" of an issue. We can understand how advertisers or demagogues try to use propaganda techniques to shift the frames of discussions so that, even though we seem to be the same people, we end up making different decisions. Even though we don't feel manipulated, we have been - by Madison Avenue agencies that know how to send broadband messages in context-modulation that bypass all our cognitive protections against content-manipulation. That's what TV is all about, to them.

Dirty pool aside, honest and diligent CEO's and civic leaders need to understand what an idea will sound like, or be taken to mean, in hundreds of different contexts, to know how to process the input they get, or how to say anything that won't offend one group or another.

If nothing else, cars for Latin America, for example, shouldn't be named "Nova" - since "No va" in Spanish means "won't go." Underarm deodorant shouldn't be advertised in Tokyo using a happy octopus logo, since in Japan an octopus doesn't have 8 arms -- it has 8 legs. Oopsie.

(photo Walking Alone, by me, on Flickr)

Turnout at Polls lowest in Decades - Boston Globe

Minority voting plummets in Boston, losing the only Latino City Council seat.

Turnout at Polls lowest in Decades
Boston Globe
Nov 7, 2007

(excerpts)

Boston's voter turnout plummeted to its lowest level in more than two decades yesterday, especially in the city's predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods, a tide of apathy that swept the City Council's only Latino member, Felix Arroyo, out of office.

Reversing a trend of increasing voting by minority groups set over the last five years, turnout was especially low in nonwhite communities and disproportionately strong in traditionally white, Irish enclaves.

More broadly, it marks a further decline in Boston's storied culture of local political involvement, in which ward-level politics has been a crucial part of the community fabric.

Secretary of State William F. Galvin ...[said] "It's a ... lack of inspiring messages."

Some observers say there has been an apathy among Boston residents that has been growing for years, the result of a transient population, younger demographics, and more diverse residents who are less likely to vote.

More on "What's the Point of Religion?"

Continuing my last post, on the New Scientist's question of "What's the Point of Religion?" I'm looking at reasons for "religion" that scientists in calm moment should be capable of understanding and accepting, in their own terms.

Probably the major point is that the social enterprise Science is not "complete." There are very large, very substantial portions of the universe which you cannot get to in finite time using the approach Science is taking, starting where we are now. Many of those portions we don't even know about, and some of them we can already see.

Furthermore, "Science" and "The Scientific Method" (or as I call it to make a point, the Scientific Method version 3.1) are, astoundingly, not even playing by their own rules and calibrating their equipment before using it -- a sin a junior scientist would get grief for. The resulting blind spot is huge, and in critical areas related to religion and social systems in general.

If scientists all admitted that the Scientific Method v3.1 (hereafter SM31) was a model, and, like all models, "wrong but sometimes useful", that would be OK - but when they implicitly assert that they have the universe covered and Religion can go home now, it becomes problematic.

I have no doubt that they don't "see anything" when they look for God, but I also don't see that they have ruled out "equipment failure" by demonstrating that they are capable of seeing far easier synthetic test case patterns with known answers.

Model-imposed blindness is widespread in all fields, including Science. Pulsars, the radio-frequency strobe lights in the sky, are the third brightest thing in that spectral range after the Sun. They were missed for years because they have low average energy but huge pulse energy, and all the equipment radio-astronomers used had electronics in place to average signal strength, because "everyone knew there as no signal there, just noise." They were found only because a female graduate assistant asked "What if we take these out?", didn't like the put-down she received, so she did -- for which discovery her male faculty adviser, who had discouraged her action, received an award. ( I was in that field at the time and heard all the details.)

Or, the "hole in the ozone" over Antarctica. That was missed for years because the satellite had been programmed to simply discard any low readings, because "everyone knew" that those would just be due to equipment malfunction.

Quantum mechanics was rejected as impossible in physics. Plate techtonics was rejected as impossible in Geology. Sure, now they are seen clearly, but before that point, they were invisible. As Thomas Kuhn noted, there is a huge resistance to a "paradigm shift" even among, or perhaps especially among, trained professionals.

Right now, the shift away from deterministic machine models of physics to chaos theory, non-linear math, distal causality, etc. is not widespread. The certainty and simplicity of the old theories create a huge reluctance to let go and move forward.

But to study social systems on a planetary scale will require moving forward. There is no way to "extrapolate" smaller scale or shorter-term mechanical or electronic systems to such large scales in space, time, and feedback complexity.

And, as astronomer Frank Drake pointed out to our astrophysics class one day in the late 1960's, every time a new window of the electromagnetic spectrum is opened up we see not only a new side of known phenomena, but we also see entirely unexpected and new phenomena that we never knew was there. This universe is dense with things going on that are not obvious.

Science can't even resolve fairly simple questions such as whether it is genes that evolve, and species are a byproduct -- or species that evolve, and genes are a byproduct. Are people just genes way of making other genes? Probably this evolutionary process occurs at multiple levels simultaneously, with bidirectional feedback loops. Most scientists don't like that idea because it's too complicated for them to follow or research. Right. So is a lot of life.

But understanding clearly how the hierarchical thing we call "Life on Earth" evolves, and what relationship higher level processes have to lower level processes is a rather central problem, I'd say. This is a very small scale, small-space, small-time model for a much larger scale hierarchy that extends upwards to ... well, we don't know where it goes. Religion says "God" and Scientists wince. But Science can't give us a reliable extrapolation either, because Science, today, can't even get its hands around what is going on on our own little plane and what principles govern evolution of planetary sized entities.

Science has exactly one data point, and all the data on that one are not in yet. That means, let's see, uh ... one minus one would be .. oh yes, ZERO. Science, then, is happily and confidently telling us that there is nothing going on at cosmic scales and time periods, on the basis of ZERO data points. Wow, that's powerful stuff -- or unreliable fluff, to use polite words.

Scientists are mostly involved in further extrapolatiting the fractal shaped knowledge-base deeper and deeper into secondary, tertiary, quaternary, and whatever comes next specialties. That's what they get paid to do. There is very little pressure, or reward, for spending time trying to put all the pieces back together again and see what they spell.

In fact, I can't imagine any PhD adviser recommending that his student consider looking at "the BIG PICTURE" and trying to say the first thing about it. That is not considered "Science" but something else, never very clear what. Narrow, narrower, narrower is the advice, the training, the research. I can't even think of what "scientific field" spends its time trying to figure out "what it all adds up to" if you reassemble all the pieces we have found.

So, that's the gap, the role, the place where religion comes in and says "THIS is what is it all about." (or 20 different "this" versions for 15 different religions.)

Science asserts confidently "there is no purpose to all this universe" based, again, on what? On a long experience with different kinds of universes, some with purpose, some without? Hardly. Do we know how this one will turn out? No, not yet. Again, we have zero data points to work with.

And, for that matter, exactly what "purpose-ometer" is used for making this judgment, and how was it calibrated? I'd really like to see that device and the test results. -- which is impossible since there is no such device.

For instance, please look at this "cake" in this hot oven and tell me for sure whether it is "being made" or simply "evolving according to natural chemical and thermodynamic principles."

Or let's see the algorithm or device or statistic that can differentiate between "coincidence" and "enemy action" with high accuracy. Or one that can tell "criminal intent" from simple incompetence with high reliability. We have no devices that can detect "purpose" on easy test cases, so why should we trust them on much larger and more complex cases? Why do scientists trust them is the puzzle to me.

Or, try this one. Do tobacco companies' Advertising cause people to smoke and die from tobacco-related medical conditions? On a small scale, viewed person by person, there is no "causality". Some people ignore ads. Etc. On a population scale, yes, of course, the billions of dollars spent on advertising have a deterministic effect, or it wouldn't keep on being spent. We have "causality" that is scale-dependent, that is not visible at short-range scales but is visible at large-range scales. This isn't news to Science.

Which is stronger - the strong force of Electromagnetic attraction or the weak force of gravity? Well, on the scale of this room, electrostatic charge can hold a balloon up on the wall despite gravity. On the scale of the galaxy, electromagnetic interactions have vanished, and gravity dominates evolution. We have no idea what even "weaker" forces their might be, so weak that we can't detect them yet, that, on the scale of billions of galaxies, might determine evolution.

Science has been great at the large-self-energy, low-interaction energy end of the spectrum, with rocks and billiard balls interacting. It has very little power, as currently constituted at the other end, where self-energy is reduced to vanishing and interaction energy dominates the scene, or a the limit point where there are no "objects" only pure "interactions" remaining.

The only place we know of so far that is near that end is apparently the center of our galaxy, and, well, we've never been there. We didn't even know there WAS a galaxy until a hundred years ago. On the scale of the universe we've sampled zero, or, if you stretch it, one incomplete case. By normal statistics, that makes the confidence limit infinite, meaning we know nothing.

I am not sold on the argument "That couldn't possibly happen because I personally can't think of how it would happen."

If Science wants to make arguments about social issues, fine, but first let's see your demonstrated capacity to manage anything whatsoever on the societal scale.

The problem is, there is no such capacity. Science so far has been going deeper and deeper into the microscope, not further and further up society's ladder. Or, any scientists left reading this, please let the rest of us know what the cure is for corruption in organizations and politics and how to stop it. Just run the numbers or something for us and show us your strength in that area to produce spectacular social outcomes - not to be confused with analysis or writing papers.
Or, heck, take something simpler and just fix the economies of the planet and prevent World War Three. When you have that one mastered, come back and let's talk about God again. But if you can't even get one single planet to work, what arrogance to consider yourselves authorities on the whole universe and how it works.

From what I can see of calibration of your equipment, you are very good at solving very small problems that cause large-scale things to decay or explode, but very bad at solving any scale thing that makes social-scale entities heal and grow, when actually attempted in the real world, not in some simulation or power-point presentation or paper.

This could be, and should be, a legitimate question for bright people of any persuasion --

what does it take to overcome the darkness and bring forth growth, peace, stability, and a thriving ecology?

What does it take to get us sufficiently organized that we can get off this little rock that's being pelted by asteroids and spread across the galaxy or farther? What does it take to roll back corruption and recover healthy growth?

Hint - the answer isn't "more technology", because technology, by itself, appears to be a centripetal force that threatens to rip our planet apart or demolish the ecosystem and biosphere. No number of cameras or high-tech walls will stop that enemy, because the enemy is already within the walls, already inside us.

We are our own worst enemy.

That's the problem we have to face, and address, and solve.

Or, frankly, we all die.

Unless you're on the verge of announcing a solution, I'd stop kicking religion in the shins and start asking what religion knows about human beings and social structures that might be helpful in this situation.

Maybe, together instead of at each other's throats, we could get somewhere.